Make Food The Tom Lando Way! – “The Irish Fire Axe”

I hath returned with a new extreme sandwich! This one had a lot more planning put into it – I decided to make it for a specific event, and I got a friend with much greater cooking experience than I to help me with it. To start with, it was…a day or two after St. Patrick’s Day. Some friends were throwing a sort of belated St. Patrick’s Day party which was officially named “The Green Party”. I had considered making some of my Great White Machetes, but someone pointed out that it would be more appropriate to supply something green. As such, I seized the opportunity to create a new extreme sandwich, this time with the following requirements – something green, something with potato, and an Irish alcohol.

I also decided to go about making these sandwiches with the help of a friend who lived nearby and was also attending the party, Nina Paciocco, who actually studied cooking and works as a pastry chef, which is significantly more experience than I can claim to have in the field of culinary arts. And, for the record, she did pretty much all the work – at the party, people would ask me if I made it. Every time I said yes, Nina would suddenly be there to hear it before I could explain her assistance, and every time I said that she did all the work…well, she wasn’t there, but if she HAD been I would’ve seemed like less of a douchebag! Anyways, apart from doing all the work while I came up with whatever recipe alterations came to mind, she also provided the crucial element of the spinach spread which we used on the bread for this particular sandwich.

So for the key ingredients, we needed something green – that one was easy for me, because I love jalapeños. Funny thing is, we didn’t even need the jalapeños, because the spinach in Nina’s spinach spread would’ve covered the green requirement anyways. But again, I love me some jalapeños. For the potato part, I considered a number of things before Nina suggested potato bread, which also gave us a direction to go in for the actual ends of the sandwich. Then out of all the Irish alcohol options I chose Guinness, because I figured it would be the simplest to cook with and would give us a wide array of options.

With those elements figured out, we just had to figure out the rest of the ingredients – most importantly, the meat! We quickly decided that the best thing to do with the Guinness would be to stir fry strip beef in it, along with some jalapeño and garlic. And of course, we added bacon! The spinach spread was actually prepared beforehand because we were using leftovers, but when we got to the actual cooking process, we did the beef stir fry while at the same time cooking the bacon in the oven. Once that was done, we cut the potato bread into a whole bunch of sandwiches, applied the spinach spread, added diced jalapeño to the sandwiches directly, and then added the bacon and beef – simple as that!

I guess the way to do it is make the spinach spread first, cook the bacon in the oven while you stir fry the beef, cut the bread, apply the spread, dice the jalapeño and apply it, and then apply the MEAT! Enjoy your Irish Fire Axe!